I have been a student of higher education for six years.  Two of those years, I was uninsured.  It’s not an uncommon place to find oneself during “Real World Purgatory” – the time between an earned degree and a career.  Your entire life is in limbo.  For the majority of us, life after our parents’ insurance drops us (at either 19 or 23) is a precarious time.  For me, that time was grad school.  Cold?  Ride it out with some Gatorade. Flu?  Pray that it’s not actually meningitis.  Slice the tip of your finger off with an X-Acto knife during printmaking?  Drive yourself to urgent care where they offer discounted treatment.  Do not, under any circumstances, get in the back of an ambulance.  I don’t care how much you’re bleeding, that’s a $1,500 cab ride, my friend.  And for God’s sake, avoid the combination of inebriation and icy sidewalks.  Like so many uninsured college students, I ended up pushing my health aside, hoping my immune system would do what I pay it to do, hoping that the generic Z-Pack my campus’s health center was handing out like candy would work.  And hoping, of course, I didn’t fall down a flight of stairs.

CNN and Oprah had an interesting question for the ladies this morning: Are you secretly sad?

The article, found here, goes on to describe a few examples of some women who describe their daily lives as if they were navigating a car with a dirty windshield. It was tolerable, sure, and they were certainly capable of it. Get up, go to work, go home. Do it all over. Sometimes happiness disappeared so gradually, they didn’t even notice. Or, maybe a certain period of stress descended on them like sadness-saturated fog. Not quite as strong as a storm cloud, but enough to dampen what would normally be good feelings. The worst part? A good day for these women was “not feeling really bad.” Maybe they would laugh occasionally. Perhaps even have a bit of fun. Eventually, though, “not feeling really bad” may only be ascertainable via alcohol, drugs, or sex.